« It was the half 1980’s that I had begun to take night views for the first time. When I got lost in the reclaimed lan along the Tokyo Bay and looked up the night sky while being rapped by the reeds in the wilderness, I felt something like Tokyo and Japan were disappearing from myself.

In 1990’s. my photographs transferred from B & W to color films. I had not mademajor photographic works on night scenes but I took picutres of the naked night invisible to my eyes while taking pictures with color reversal films of the night scenes collecting the available moonlight and artificial town lighting. Colors, shadows and shapes of the night were filled with the fresh vitality that might not be imagined in daytime. Commonplace scens in daylight turned into the exotic scenes.
Here I tried to catch the fabulous colors and shadows of the night that had not been seen in the Japanese photography.

I happened to encounter the darkest night without colors and lights like picutres of error. However, they were not erros but the photographs taken at the critical point of the night in the deep shadows. I was absored into the deep shadows and I could not identify myself from thedarkness.
I encountered these darkness photographs a few years ago and I went forward into the shadows in the background, instead of the colors and lights of night aginst the darkness background. When I began to synchronize with the darkness frequency of the night, I witnessed the deeper shadows in the towns, forests and seacoasts.
« Ultra » is the thing that exists beyond the border of light and shadow. It is the atmosphere of the excessive darkness coming from the night and might be my memory of the night a long time ago.Here was the world’s deepest shadow fixed on the photographic films. it was the fabulous, horrible but heart-comforting time moving at the end of the night. When I was absorbed into the darkness without sensation, the rough grains of darkness came up with the colorless colors that disappeared in the night. » (Katsuhito Nakazato, presentation en anglais de Ultra)

TOKEI(東亰）

In Tokyo’s northeast,enclosed by four rivers;the Arakawa,Sumida,Kyu-nakagawa and Kita-jukken, is a roughly triangular urban tract known as Mukojima.

The district today is an involved maze of alleys lined with old wooden dwellings,row houses(nagaya), and workshops that have miraculously sidestepped the ravages of both the Pacific War (WWII) and the economic bubble of the late 1980’s.

Enter the convoluted milieu of this town and soon all sense of direction is lost.Wandering astray through the streets you can sense the accumulated strata of the life of the city in their yet unfaded colors. An original city landscape now vanished from Tokyo — vanished from Japan – comes back to life, drawing forth a sigh for things that are now only memorires.

It is a nostalgia that bypasses a full three quarters of the twentieth century, going back to the Taisho era years (1910’s) surrounding the First World War,and beyond to Japan’s late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century Maiji era.

The Edo era of the Tokugawa Shoguns gave way in 1868 to the modernizing Meiji era. At this point the city of Edo took on the name 東京（Tokyo : « eastern capital”) an expression of its relationship to what till then had been the capital of 京都（Kyoto : « capital metropolis”). But the people of Edo objected to their cry being styled no more than an eastern version of the now eclipsed Kyoto, and added a distinctive extra storke to the 京 to make 亰.This altered character for ‘capital’ was pronounced ‘key’ making for 東亰、or Tokei. The name Tokei was used at the beginning of the Meiji era (the end ob the 1860’s through to the 1870’s) but eventually faded into thin air.

Tokei:a city shrouded over by history midway through Meiji.Yet I found that phantom city in present day Mukojima.

Mukojima was a farming village and the Daimyo’s country residence.
Vegetables and fruits were grown there with fertilizers brought in from Edo.
Following the end of the Edo Government in 1868, Sumida was included within the Tokyo city limits. In 1878, it was placed into Honjo Ward and Minami-Katsushika County.
With the beginning of the Meiji Period, the sites of samurai residences were easy to acquire at lower prices. This, along with the fact that water transportation was convenient, attracted many factories and the area become a center of industry.
The Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 significantly damaged Sumida, with damage to Honjo Ward being especially serious.
The Capital City Restoration Plan included a large-scale realignment of ward boundaries that resulted in making Sumida one of the most densely-populated areas in Tokyo as it attracted more factories and became home to the workers employed by them.
In 1932, Mukojima Ward was established through the incorporation of Sumida, Terajima, Oki, and Azuma Villages.
On March 10th, 1945, a devastating American air raid left Tokyo in ashes and reduced its population to just 25% of what it had been before the war. When the city was rebuilt, planners decided to incorporate Honjo and Mukojima Wards to make Sumida Ward on March 15, 1947.
This ancient area full of culture and vitality is now home to Tokyo’s newest landmark, TOKYO SKYTREE.(Wikipedia).